Out of the box

November 14, 2021 - Blaine Beyer

Life is full of checkboxes.

Are you married? Do you have children? What's your occupation?

Lots of checkboxes.

For the longest time, I thought I had to make sure I was ticking all of life's proverbial checkboxes. Graduate college. Find the job. Find the spouse. Find the house. Start a family.

Recently, I got to check a whole set of boxes I haven't been able to mark in a long time.

I've had to fill out a lot of medical paperwork as of late. I've had a slew of different doctor's appointments.

In the long list of checkboxes throughout these forms, there are always a few that make me want to crawl under a table.

"Do you use any of the following? Alcohol. Tobacco. Recreational drugs."

I use to lie about these questions, especially the "frequency of use" questions that followed.

For the first time in a long time, I was able to mark "no" on these three questions.

I struggled with some form of addiction for nearly 12 years. Addiction is a nasty, brutal demon that ruins not only your life but traumatizes those around you. If you were around me in this period of my life, you knew.

Substance misuse was never supposed to be in my list of checkboxes. My parents warned me that I had a genetic disposition to addiction. And I knew that I had the tendency to overdo things, but it took me YEARS to come to terms with the fact that I had a problem.

Thankfully, I've been free for 670 days. If we make it to January, it will be 2 years without any harmful chemicals in my body.

I share all of this to say that these checkboxes, while functioning as a tool for medical evaluation, tormented me.

In the same anxiety-filled fashion, I tried to put a strict set of checkboxes on my relationships.

Because of where I was raised and how I was raised, the examples of "healthy" and "appropriate" relationships looked like finding your college sweetheart, getting engaged, graduating, getting married, starting your careers, buying the house, having the kids, and so on. "Ring by spring!" Right?

Every relationship I had, I tried to turn it into that "fairytale." I tried to shove a lot of square, triangle, diamond, and rhombus-shaped pegs into the round hole of my life.

When I met my fiancé, a single mom of two young boys, I struggled knowing I was falling in love with someone who didn't fit this prescribed path. I knew I loved her more than anything I've ever known. But our relationship looked nothing like the predestined bullshit I thought I was supposed to achieve. She knew this and we fought those backward values head-on together. And I'm so thankful we did.

Life's checkboxes can mess you up.

Whether it's lying on medical forms because you don't want to confront your addictive propensities or scaring yourself away from the most meaningful relationships of your life, the guidelines we set up for ourselves can be toxic.

At work, we recently started brainstorming on how to update our visitor cards to be more inclusive. These visitor cards are laden with checkboxes. Our goal was to update the language to ensure we're providing the most comprehensive options for all people.

My fiancé says they regularly update their intake forms for her clients. She even encourages new clients to add things to the forms, if they feel like something is missing.

Both of these examples remind me that we are capable of thinking outside of these boxes to consider the entire human experience.

We need to stop forcing our checkboxes on other people.

Not everyone is married or wants to be married. Not everyone has children or wants to have children. Not everyone can go to college or wants to go to college. Not everyone can afford the white picket fence.

And that's okay.

Stop worrying about checking the boxes and start thinking about who we are outside of those constraints.

Humanity is unlimited.

Think outside of the box.